Golden Hours*

Kai Lung, Wandering Philosopher, is Hero in a Minor

Classic

The Story. Kai Lung, wandering philosopher and teller of tales in the days before China was troubled by the ways of Western civilization, fell into converse--and love--in the course of his peregrinations with a pleasant willow-pattern young lady nicknamed the "Golden Mouse"--and in the very same day acquired the undying enmity of the execrable Ming-Shu, chief henchman of the Mandarin Shan Tien. Kai Lung was brought to the Mandarin for judgment. "He raised his rebellious voice," remarked the prosecutor unpleasantly. "The usual remedy in such cases ... is strangulation." Everything was ready for the necktie-party, when Kai Lung, previously advised by the Golden Mouse, began to spill a Sheherazade to the noble Mandarin, his initial opus being The Story of Wong Ts'in and the Willow Plate Embellishment. By the time the story was ended it was, of course, too late in the day to execute Kai Lung--and so the days went on--in spite of the degraded persistence of the effete Ming-Shu, Kai Lung always managed to turn aside with a novelette in one style or another, the blade of the axe of doom whenever it rested too unpleasantly close to his neck. At last, in fact, the tables were turned indeed--the evilly nimble feet of Ming-Shu entrapped into a fatal error of judgment that implicated Shan Tien--Ming-Shu took Kai Lung's place in the Oriental jail--and Kai Lung, happily bribed, and urbane as ever, departed for the house of his fathers with his bride, the Golden Mouse. "Venerated Father," exclaimed Kai Lung, "this is she who has been destined from the beginning of time to raise up a hundred sons to keep your life extant." "In that case," remarked the patriarch, "your troubles are only just beginning . . ." and the story ends. The stories told by Kai Lung in his golden hours--fantastic, urbane, ironic, witty, courteous, magical-- --these stories, naturally, are the substance of the book--jade emblems strung on a cord of Chinese silver, emblems marked with enchanted characters. The Significance. Kai Lung's Golden Hours is not a book to read at a sitting with breathless excite ment--it is a book to be dipped into and laid aside and dipped into again, and always with pleasure and refreshment. It is also a book to keep --and a book that can be reread again and again, because it has that certain intangible felicity of manner about it that has frequently been called style. Of its kind, it is a minor classic. The Critics. Hilaire Belloc in his preface: "The Wallet of Kai Lung (a predecessor to Kai Lung's Golden Hours) was a thing made deliberately, in hard material, and completely successful. It was meant to produce a particular effect of humor by the use of a foreign convention, the Chinese convention, in the English tongue. It was meant to produce a certain effect of philosophy and at the same time ... a certain completed interest of fiction, of relation, of a short epic. It did all these things. Kai Lung's Golden Hours is worthy of its forerunner." The Author. Ernest Bramah is an Englishman who knows China and the Chinese as few foreigners of any nationality know them. He is known in the literary world for The Wallet of Kai Lung and Kai Lung's Golden Hours.

Beautiful Blossoms

The Very Finest Scions Flower on Their Family Trees

A kangaroo and a flea are much the same. They both jump. But a kangaroo has a certain nobility and a flea at times can be most annoying. It is the same with Art and Science. They both hop all over man and his world. But Art is conveniently flattering to man and Science can be most uncomplimentary. Art makes us bare forked animals the protagonists of the great drama of life. Science puts us in our places. That is why genealogy is an art. It takes a whole family tree to make a man, What could be better calculated to cater to a man's importance than realization that his great-great -great -great -great -great-great- great -great -great -great -great-great-great -great -great - great -great-great-great -great -great -great -great-great- grandparents were a good deal more numerous than the population of the United States? And among them by the sheer force of chance--must have been at least a dozen Hardings, Wilsons, Fords, Rockefellers, potentates, poets, parasites, paragons, pagans, peers, plebeians. It is surely an art to show that George F. Babbitt has the blood of the Caesars in his veins. What is more, it contributes to Mr. Babbitt's importance. All of which is prelude to the announcement of a great literary and artistic event. A. N. Marquis Co. of Chicago, publishers of Who's Who In America, "after more than five years of unremitting labor and the most painstaking research"--are about to publish First Families of America -- the Abridged Compendium of American Genealogy. To those who are interested in genealogy (and to those who are not) this book will undoubtedly render a great service. If it cannot tell people where they are going, at least it will tell where they came from. It will be the best possible hand book for all mothers with marriageable children. It will be a useful guide to merchants in granting credit--for obviously there should be a difference in the amounts which descendants of Abe Lincoln and of Jesse James should be allowed to charge. First Families of America should lend a new significance to Arbor Day, and with some useful slogan, like "Plant Another Family Tree," should inspire many ambitious young men with the first principles of conservation.

M. G.

Mrs. Stratton-Porter

Clean and Moral, Her Heroes and Heroines Strive for a Better World

Mr. Sinclair Lewis, who kodaks as he goes, has written two best-sellers on the subject, apparently, of what most people are. But Mrs. Gene Stratton-Porter, a woman who writes on the theory that " the greatest service a piece of fiction can do any reader is to leave him with a higher ideal of life than he had when he began," holds an audience of 45,000,000 men, women and children by telling them what they certainly are not but (presumably) would like to be.

Mrs. Porter's publishers have computed that one of her books has been sold every minute of every day and night for the past 17 years. Laddie, Freckles, A Girl of the Limberlost, The Harvester, Her Father's Daughter are the names of a few of these. They are all based, Mrs. Porter says, on people she has known, " on thoroughly clean and decent people who still believe in God and cherish high ideals." They are based also on the wonder of Nature, and are all heavily medicated with that anodyne; for Mrs. Porter is a distinguished naturalist whose first fiction was simply Sunkist Nature studies. The famous Limberlost swamp in Indiana, where she lives and works, is the setting of almost all her books.

On August 17, her birthday, Mrs. Porter's new novel, The White Flag, a story of her girlhood home, which is now appearing in Mr. Hearst's Good Housekeeping, will be published in book form. One distributing agency has already ordered 100,000 copies. The book will probably sell four or five times that amount. It is safe to assert that if every publisher had one or more authors like Gene Stratton-Porter on his list, there would be no Clean Books bills before the Legislature.

To the charge that her pictures of life are idealized, Mrs. Porter answers :

" They are. They form idealized pictures of life' because they are copies from life where it touches religion, chastity, love, home and hope of Heaven ultimately. None of these roads leads to publicity and the divorce court. They all end in the shelter and seclusion of a home.

" I have left detailed descriptions of intrigue and adultery to those men and women who feel qualified to handle these subjects in a manner beneficial to the reading public. I am neither blind nor lacking in perception as to the waywardness and complications of human nature. It is merely that my call has been to depict the lives of clean, moral men and women who are spending their time and strength in an effort to make the world a better place for themselves and for their children."

C. S.

Good Books

The following estimates of books much in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion:

CASTLE CONQUER--Padraic Colum --Macmillan ($2.00). This first novel by a distinguished poet deals with the Ireland of 50 years ago. The main thread is the love affair between Francis Gillick, "spoilt" priest, young student returned from a Spanish college to work in the fields, and Brighid Moynagh, country girl, that "snowy-breasted pearl."

THE DOOM DEALER--David Fox-- McBride ($2.00). Miss Arabella Wyatt of Millerstown, wealthy, forty, single, orphaned, the only companion of her loneliness a faithful maid, discovered that one can be and have all these things and be out of luck as well. Imprimis: her fiance, the secretive Mr. Ogden Ronalds, dropped dead at the very altar on their marriage day. Heart disease, they said, but Miss Wyatt had her suspicions. And then she found out that all her family jewels had been stolen and false gems substituted for them-- and then she was thinking of marrying another man, a childhood friend, and began to get anonymous letters, threatening doom if she did. Pretty tough. But, luckily, she received an advertisement of the Shadowers, Inc. --a band of supercrooks turned private detectives--and took her troubles to them. After many trials and tribulations they solved the mystery--and the wedding-bells rang out. A detective story with certain unusual twists that make it interesting despite a bald and conventional style.

THE HAT OF DESTINY--Mrs. T. P. O'Connor (wife of the "Father of the House of Commons")--Lieber and Lewis ($2.00). Mr. William Jones, man-milliner extraordinary, got up a Franco-American Hat Show in Paris, with a thousand-franc prize offer for the best chapeau. The prize was won --the hat proved a Hat of Destiny--it came to America--and instantly produced impish complications in the lives and loves of all sorts and conditions of people--from Newport matrons to ladies' maids--then, relenting, brought the various personae back to happiness again. Light, facile, amusing--not too exciting but uniformly pleasant--a tall lemonade of a book, well iced, not over sugary.

*KAI-LUNG'S GOLDEN HOURS--Ernest Bramah--Doran ($2.50).